I guess that if exporting below Android 5.0 is not available it would be for some reason, but...can we expect it in the near future?

My cellphone, for example, is a mid-tier one running on KitKat, it can play pretty much any game, and to this day I never got any android version incompatibility with anything I ever tried to download from the Play Store (Well, as a matter of fact, I actually had that problem with Super Mario Run but the very next day I tried again and it downloaded and ran just fine).

As cool as directly exporting apks is, this is kind of dissapointing and greatly reduces C3 scope.

Android 5.0+ already covers 70% of devices. This time last year it only covered 43% of devices. By this time next year, pre-Lollipop support will probably be more or less irrelevant.

On top of that, Crosswalk is no longer actively developed, probably for the same reason, so there is little we can do if people run in to problems with it. Then there's a lot of people out there who go around the Internet saying "Construct 2 generates bloated APKs, it adds 20mb of overhead", which only happens if you select Android <5.0 support, and isn't true if you select Android 5.0+. It seemed to be a significant point to a number of users and impacted the reputation of C2's mobile export (unfairly IMO, since you could easily remove it). I'd rather make a fresh start with Construct 3 and never generate APKs with any overhead.

@AshleyI understand your reasoning. But, imo, wouldn't it be more acceptable to have your paying customers make that choice?

Why not at least offer 4.4 in the build choices? You can still put 5.0+ as the default in the export's dropdown list. Then, if someone chooses 4.4 they would see a warning that it will add the 20mb of "bloat". But, to ignore over 300 MILLION devices (18.8% of android devices use 4.4) from using any app or game made in C3 is very disappointing. That's not a small number. That's like telling the population of the United States that they can't install a C3 game. Not to mention, you've just eliminated most of my devices from being used for any testing and seriously has me questioning if C3 is the right route for me this year...since mobile is my primary target. Until now, I was very excited for C3......

You will also have to set up the Android build tools to build for android, and the same if you want iOS.

To warn you; the current version of Cordova CLI hasn't been out very long so it's not really stable and the previous version of Cordova doesn't work with the latest Android build tools so you'll need to install an older version to actually build an APK.

We'll probably publish a guide on manual Cordova builds at some point, but I can't offer a timescale.